Except that they just wouldn’t. All over Mesoamerica, the avian and feline lineages had always been at daggers. And they always would be. And the other clans-the Rattler’s pledges and the other families with totems that weren’t birds or cats-would always be making an alliance with one side and then with the other. These people were like any other mafias, they thrived on vendettas. It was part of their soup. They counted on fresh booty to keep them solvent. It was like Israel and the Muslim states, even their gods hated each other, despite their being the same.

And now, after the fall of Teotihuacan, both sides had absolutely nailed their colors to the masts. And as far as the independent parties went-I mean the Rattler’s pledges-well, even though both the feline and avian sides saw the Star Rattler cult as a threat to their hegemony, the Rattlers had been in bed with the Harpies for more than a b’aktun, and now there was just too much bad blood for us to even approach the felines. Koh had to support the Harpies right up through the moment the Harpies-gods willing-took control of Ix. And even then the Harpies wouldn’t kick the Ocelots out. Instead they’d blood themselves to the clan and become Ocelots themselves. The whole thing was cray-cray.

Still, if I wanted to get back to 2012, I’d have to go along with it. It was going to be up to me to build a whole tomb for myself, and set up the sarcophagus and mix up the jelly and lay out another set of lodestones and a hundred other things, and there wouldn’t be any way to do that on Harpy territory while the Harpies were under constant attack. Even if the Chocula team found my tomb in one of the Harpy catacombs instead of in the main Ocelot one where we’d planned to put it. Which I couldn’t count on. No, no, no. We simply had to take over the whole place. Even if it didn’t feel possible.

For that matter, right now I didn’t see how I could get everything together before my brain gave out. Hell, hell, hell and corruption. In fact, it didn’t even feel like we’d make it to Ix. All these people around gave you an illusory sense of security, but Severed Right Hand’s forces were just too big and too well trained and on three sides they were all the fuck around us. If we dug in someplace nearer than Ix-anywhere other than a real city-even with stockade fences and an endless water supply and a stock of stored corn, we wouldn’t last a month. And then Ix would be just another hostile city, and my chances of getting in there and pulling off an entombment on the sly would be, I don’t know, roughly the same odds as Mel Gibson’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. If anything, I should try to make sure we stick to the Ix plan. Basically, get back to Ix, use my Unlimited Personal Power to help 2 Jeweled Skull take the place over or at least reach a favorable truce with the Ocelots, get my tomb built, mix up the necessary compounds, seal myself in, and hope for the best. Getta condo made-a stone-a. No problem. Get in, get down, and get out.

And the first thing to do was hook up Lady Koh with 2 Jeweled Skull. She’d be the next big thing, so it’d be doing him a favor. Scratch his back, et cetera. Even if he was in trouble with the Ocelots, the Harpy Clan was still probably the richest family in Ix, and he was still the head of it. Right? In fact, maybe we should just let everyone know we were going to Ix. As of now, only the leaders knew about it at all. Our given-out destination was Kaminaljuyu, which is, or used to be, where they put Guat City later on. Otherwise all we’d said was that we were going to go through what was later called Oaxaca, and which was now a heavily populated collection of little city-states that had been part of the Empire. On the other hand, if we told anyone, the cats could head us off. Or 9 Fanged Hummingbird could get ready for us, or something, maybe better not…

I lay back and even started to doze off, but then heard something shiveringly familiar:

“1 Porcupine Ass caught two of the three man-beetles.”

I got a shiver for no reason and then it took me a beat to realize it was only a couple of amateur beat-keepers somewhere ahead, chanting verses for drinking-water rations, timing how long each blood could keep his mouth under the waterskin. And they were using the same currently popular song that the Ball Brethren, and their guest bloods from the other Ixian clans, had used to mark the time-outs on that night-definitely the worst night of my life, and there were plenty of other contenders-the night fifty-two days ago when they’d dressed me up as a deer and hunted me down:

(Drink) He ground them up in one big pot, he threw (stop)

(Drink) Twenty blue seed-corn skulls into the pot (stop)…

Well, things were different now. The world might be ending, but at least I was in with the in crowd.

My dresser-not Armadillo Shit, but an attendant who was even lower on the totem stele-came up with my urine bag. Ahh, redivivus. He gave me a shot of cold cacao out of a dogskin, checked and oiled my feet and tied on a fresh pair of running sandals, and ran off-road to bury my excretion so that nobody’d get hold of it and work action-at-a-distance curses on me. Go for it, guy, I thought. Do whatever you gotta do. I had them put me down and I broke into our near-jog. The thin stony air felt detoxifying. I went off-path for a minute and could see Koh’s three identical palanquins a score or so rope-lengths up the line. I guess the idea was that if we got raided they wouldn’t know which one she was in. The defile opened out into a high plain between extinct volcanoes, still showing the grid of an ancient city, speckled with dead scrub oaks and dead agaves and ocatillos and my namesake firebushes and all crawling with mating-drifts of black ladybugs. Oddly, there were still flakes of wood ash following us from the house fires behind us and they swept across the overgrown courts and twirled into Grasshopper pranksters, dust-devils, dervishing goofily ahead of us toward the old temple precinct. A few bloods were out in the ruins, canceling old cat-related zoomorphs. We didn’t want to leave a specific trail, even though there was no way the track sweepers in the rear could really eradicate the traces of so many people. Some “pastless clans”-people who, in the twelfth b’aktun, we’d call the homeless-had squatted in the old palaces, but when we came through they waddled away from us like dazed postnuke mutants and peeked out from behind charred adobe walls.

By the sun’s death we’d come into the Knife Mines. It was a glistening black rockscape of flash-frozen lava spatters, basically a holograph of a few seconds in a geologically violent day that, tradition said, was the starting date, 8/18/-3041, Gregorian. The white sky turned red, meaning that our ancestor, the Great Eastern bacab- timebearer — was coming out to watch us, and as the red deepened he blew a different wind our way, one with a fertile eggy scent. I could feel magma throb through the ground, radiating almost-reassuring maternal energy from the giant watchful presence ahead. Out beyond the bluffs green sheet lightning crackled up along the rim of the sky. Wind rose and Hun Xoc decided that since it might cover our tracks we should move the whole chain from the main road to a smaller trail. To get there we had to strike across this Ishtar-Terra-ish plateau in the dark and it was a little extreme, you couldn’t hear anything and most of the time you couldn’t see Thing Zero, so there was no way to get bearings and Hun Xoc’s Rattler guides were navigating by literature. Lightning would coil around overhead into repulsive knots, and for a beat you’d see everything in all-over powdery light like industrial fluorescents. By morning we were in a long north-south valley with a few dead trees all tilting in the same direction, away from the Deer, that is, Virgo. The only good part was that the villagers sold us some snow from the peaks. We insisted on having our own chef make it into guava-pickle slushies.